The Exponential Family

This is the generalization of the family of function where Softmax Function belongs. Many many functions are part of this family, most of the distributions that are used in science are part of the exponential family, e.g. beta, Gaussian, Bernoulli, Categorical distribution, Gamma, Beta, Poisson, are all part of the exponential family. The useful thing is the generalization power of this set of functions: if you prove something about this family, you prove it for every distribution that is part of this family. This family of functions is also closely linked too Generalized Linear Models (GLMs). ...

October 20, 2024 · Reading Time: 6 minutes ·  By Xuanqiang Angelo Huang

Dependency Parsing

This set of note is still in TODO Dependency Grammar has been much bigger in Europe compared to USA, where Chomsky’s grammars ruled. One of the main developers of this theory is Lucien Tesnière (1959): “The sentence is an organized whole, the constituent elements of which are words. Every word that belongs to a sentence ceases by itself to be isolated as in the dictionary. Between the word and its neighbors, the mind perceives connections, the totality of which forms the structure of the sentence. The structural connections establish dependency relations between the words. Each connection in principle unites a superior term and an inferior term. The superior term receives the name governor (head). The inferior term receives the name subordinate (dependent).” ~Lucien Tesnière ...

October 19, 2024 · Reading Time: 4 minutes ·  By Xuanqiang Angelo Huang

Probabilistic Parsing

Language Constituents A constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure This is because there is a lot of evidence pointing towards an hierarchical organization of human language. Example of constituents Let’s have some examples: John speaks [Spanish] fluently John speaks [Spanish and French] fluently Mary programs the homework [in the ETH computer laboratory] Mary programs the homework [in the laboratory] ...

November 20, 2024 · Reading Time: 5 minutes ·  By Xuanqiang Angelo Huang

Introduction to Natural Language Processing

The landscape of NLP was very different in the beginning of the field. “But it must be recognized that the notion ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one, under any known interpretation of this term 1968 p 53. Noam Chomsky. Probability was not seen very well (Chomsky has said many wrong things indeed), and linguists were considered useless. Recently deep learning and computational papers are ubiquitous in major conferences in linguistics, e.g. ACL. ...

August 11, 2024 · Reading Time: 2 minutes ·  By Xuanqiang Angelo Huang